However:
1. The cottage keyers are paying more than $2,600 a year to rent their machines. Doesn’t this smack of company-store tactics in a mining town? Why not finance the purchase of the worker’s own machine, which he or she might pay off in a year? Blue Cross official Tim Blackwell—who has given his company some useful feedback based on his wife’s experiences—defends the steep charge for the machines. He says it’s actually an incentive. The more a cottage keyer works and earns, the smaller will be the percentage of her income going to pay for the terminal cost.
2. The telecommuters don’t get the security that full timers do.
3. Likewise, the cottage keyers lack the normal fringe benefits. The program could delight a wife whose husband holds a steady job with good health insurance and other benefits. On the other hand, the arrangement could be bad news for a worker depending on the telecommuting for his or her main income. Significantly, women head most single-parent households.
4. The keyers may not be sharing the experiment’s rewards fifty-fifty. Excluding minor administrative expenses, the telecommuters’ services cost the firm $47.40 a day on the average, minus whatever profit the company may make off the terminals it rents to the workers. Let’s say the final expense is $45. By contrast, the regular workers cost at least[at least] $50.52 a day if you include vacation, fringe benefits, and the $5.30 that the firm pays for a terminal lease. Missing, however, are the expenses of office space. Also, the company’s getting slightly more work from the telecommuters with only about 12 percent as many errors!
Could an antitelecommuting backlash develop as workers catch on to the economics?
Already the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations and the Services Employees International Union have proposed the outlawing of computer homework. Given the political climate of the mid-1980s, that seemed unlikely. This could change, however. Gil Gordon, an ex-Johnson and Johnson personnel man turned telecommuting consultant, correctly warns against using telecommuting to bargain down workers’ pay or bust up organizing drives.
“There’s nothing new about shift work, piecework, which is what pay per line of information is,” says Karen Nussbaum, president of 9 to 5, the National Association of Working Women. “Or pay by keystroke homework. That’s a step back into the Middle Ages, if you ask me, and into the cottage industries.”[[62]]
A difference exists, after all, between creative jobs, like Hewes’s, and those that, in any setting, will be drudge work. The question is Where will the typing, the data entry, the other labor, be more palatable—home or normal office? And ideally that’s a worker-by-worker, company-by-company, decision. Perhaps some workers will eventually strike for the right to telecommute. In fact, Glenn E. Watts, president of the Communications Workers of America, while frowning on electronic scabbing, once said that telecommuters might even plug into union gatherings. Union opposition to telecommuting could very well change. The big variable is whether companies will follow Gil Gordon’s wise advice not to use telecommuting as a union-busting ploy.
Of course, presently, home work isn’t for all. Today a telecommuter can’t make steel, cars, or refrigerators by remote control. He or she can’t cook a Big Mac, sweep a floor, run a supermarket checkout, or load a truck; for telecommuting is now strictly the province of white-collar workers and professionals. Indeed, companies in predominantly blue-collar fields may decide that certain office jobs just defy wiring in. Suppose an auto worker suffers a series of late paychecks. Will a payroll clerk sitting in a comfortable suburban home be as responsive as he might be dealing with the man face-to-face?